Meet Charlie Jones, Candidate For Pleasanton School Board
I'm a member of the Tri-Valley Democratic Club, supporting voter registration and engagement throughout our region. I am also a supporter of the Amador Friends of Music, regularly attending their events to support the marching band program that I was a part of. Their live auctions are particularly fun, and handmade items they sell are always beautiful. I'm also on the county-level steering committee for the California Teachers Association, where I have helped Pleasanton teachers advocate for our students' needs and secure funds for professional development.
Pleasanton has three major problems that we need to address: our budget crisis, our lack of true community collaboration, and our need to protect and expand the programs that make PUSD one of the best school districts in the nation.
The first issue is that our school district has been deficit spending for five years, which has led to cuts across the board and damaged the relationship between the district, parents, and employees. I would begin to correct this by bringing together all relevant stakeholders – district experts, parents, educators, support staff, and members of the broader Pleasanton community – to truly assess and understand our current budget. We would then map out where we could better spend our budget more wisely and where cuts could be made furthest from the classroom, and then work to build a 5-year budget plan so we aren't doing this chaotically at the end of each year. We should also look for state and federal grants to better support programs that we know need better funding.
Second, we need to have true community collaboration with our labor partners, our parents, and the rest of the Pleasanton community. Many of the decisions our district has made have been without real community engagement or even any proper notification for our parents, teachers, and support staff. This has led to multiple years of strike authorizations, each of which were narrowly avoided, leading to our district losing employees and struggling to fill vacancies. I would work to heal the District's relationship with our employees and further strengthen our policies to require concrete proof of community outreach before the School Board implements anything major.
Lastly, while our schools are among the best in California, we could be doing better when it comes to expanding the services and programs we offer our students. We haven't fully expanded our Dual Language Program or MultiLingual Learner program, meaning that immigrant and newcomer students aren't able to fully participate in their school community at the same level as their peers. We are also still seeing our students impacted by the pandemic learning loss, so we need to reject any budget cuts to the mental health and guidance counseling services our students still need. Through stronger ties between the Chamber of Commerce and PUSD, we can expand career-technical education and technology access at all school sites, with an even deeper focus on local economic opportunities. I would work hard to build a coalition of Board Trustees and community members to push back against cuts to our student needs, and to fight to expand the programs that bring families (just like mine) to Pleasanton.
I am a proud product of the Pleasanton school system and grew up here, meaning that I know firsthand what has worked for students and what needs to be improved. As a teacher of seven years and with a degree in History - Secondary Education, I have unique experience and knowledge of what goes on in the classroom and what teachers require in order to better support our students. In fact, I am the only candidate in the race endorsed by the Association of Pleasanton Teachers, and I would be the only person on our School Board with experience teaching during and after the pandemic. I have worked on budget issues and surplus property committees in HUSD over multiple years, successfully balancing budgets and preventing significant program cuts, so I already have experience working on the biggest problem our district faces. Education is my passion, and I've dedicated my life to it. I firmly believe that every child has the right to a high-quality education, and I fight every day to make that happen.
